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Matt Ridley: Optimism without limits

By Liz Else

Good news&colon; the world can only continue getting better. That is the bold prophecy Matt Ridley lays out in his new book The Rational Optimist. It sounds like just the boast we need in these difficult economic times, says Liz Else, but it reads like ideology dressed with cherry-picked science

I’M ON the way to a smart hotel in Soho, London, to meet Matt Ridley, the aristocratic zoologist-turned-journalist who has become one of the UK’s foremost science writers. He has a new book out with the daring title The Rational Optimist&colon; How Prosperity Evolves.